Entry for April 2017:
In 2014, Olga Sutherland, Anssi Perakyla
and I published a study applying Conversation Analysis (CA) to Compassionate
Self-Soothing in Emotion-Focused Therapy, fulfilling the old dream of mine of
applying CA to psychotherapy. Then late
last year, Olga contacted me about a new CA project on what she is calling
deontics, which is basically how therapists get clients to do things. In other words, she was proposing to apply CA
to the long-standing issue of therapist directiveness, and had assembled a team
of CA experts to work together on this.
Given that the Self-Soothing episodes we had studied previously were
rich in therapist process-guiding, she proposed starting with this collection,
which was primarily drawn from our Social Anxiety study data set.
Then at the beginning of April, one of her
collaborators, Alexa Hepburn, a well-known conversational analysis specialist
now at Rutgers University in New Jersey, asked for permission to use excerpts from
this collection for a colloquium that she was going to give at UCLA in
mid-April at the Center for Language, Interaction and Culture (CLIC). What was
the topic?, I asked. Empathic and
sympathetic responses to emotional expression, specifically crying, was the
answer.
This brought me up short, because of a remarkable
configuration of circumstances: First, UCLA was where I did my PhD studies in
Clinical Psychology in the 1970’s, and also where I studied Conversation
Analysis for two years with Manny Schegloff, one of its founders. Second, when I looked into CLIC, it appeared
very likely that it was the successor to the collection of sociologists and
anthropologists that I had rubbed shoulders with during those two years. Third, I discovered that Alexa is from the UK
and got her PhD at Glasgow Caledonian University. Fourth, the topic was empathy and emotion,
which is absolutely central to my practice as a therapist and trainer. Finally, she was proposing to play a segment
of me doing therapy.
Contemplating all this, I looked at my
calendar and discovered that Alexa’s colloquium was scheduled for the 19th
of April, a few days after my arrival back in California: It was actually
possible for us to drive from the San Francisco Bay area down to Los Angeles to
attend her colloquium. I tentatively proposed
this to Diane, and she jumped at the chance to catch up with our old friends
Hugh and Gail, who live in West Los Angeles, near UCLA. In fact, we had been
intending to make such a trip, but just hadn’t got around to organizing
anything yet.
The result was a hastily-thrown together,
almost impulsive, trip to LA. Diane
booked the hotel, and I cancelled almost all of the 8 appointments I had booked
for the two days of the trip.
We arrived in LA at dinner time on a Tuesday
evening, having arranged to meet Hugh and Gail at their favourite Mexican
restaurant. The next day Gail spent much
of her day off driving us around West LA and Santa Monica, revisiting our old
stomping grounds: The apartment we lived in for 5 years, off Santa Monica
Boulevard; but also theatres, churches, restaurants and so, including the Santa
Monica Pier. Finally, she dropped us off
at UCLA, where we wandered around for an
hour, including Franz Hall (the Psychology building) with its inverted
fountain. It was a delightful nostalgia trip.
Finally, we headed for Haines Hall, where
Alexa’s colloquium was to take place. I remembered that this was the building
where I’d studied CA for those two years. We settled into the Anthropology
Reading Room. In a bit, Alexa came in and introduced herself, also her
partner, who turned out to be Jonathan Potter, of UK (U of Loughborough) CA and
discourse analysis fame, now Dean of the School of Communications at
Rutgers.
Alexa Hepburn’s colloquium focused on
making the case for opening up interactions around emotion expression for
further investigation (e.g., Hepburn, 2004).
As an Emotion-Focused Therapist, this certainly made sense to me. Focusing on crying, she presented three
segments: one from a child protection telephone crisis line in the UK, one of
two Australian sisters talking on the phone, and a solarized video segment of
me using compassionate self-soothing with one of my socially anxious
clients. The solarisation did such a
good job of disguising the identities of me and the client, that no one in the
audience of 30 faculty, students and affiliated researchers recognized me.
It was an eerie experience seeing this
segment so closely transcribed and analysed. Although Alexa had said something
at the beginning of her talk about me being there, people were startled when
they realized that the therapist whose interaction was being analysed was in
the room. Apparently, it is highly
unusual for this to happen. It was useful,
however, to have me there to answer questions about the nature of the therapy,
given that it involved a piece of two chair work in which the client touched
the centre of their emotional pain.
Alexa had had only a week or so to begin
analyzing this last segment, enough time to do a very detailed Jefferson-type
transcript of it and to develop a couple of observations about the interaction:
1. Transcribing emotional expression
requires special transcription conventions for capturing sniffs, sobs, breathiness,
silence, volume drops and sound stretches, and tremulous, creaky or squeaky
vocal quality.
2. Various Listener actions in the three segments
included:
-disruption licenses (“take your time”)
-reassurance/validation (“you’re doing the
right thing”)
-sympathetic responses (“mmm”, “o::hhh”)
-tag questions (“… isn’t it?”)
-back to business responses (“Ohkay::,
so…”)
Plus a variety of “empathic formulations”,
such as “It’s very hard” and “I guess that just hurts so bad”.
3. One observation in particular struck me:
In the EFT segment, Alexa described the client’s crying as “diagnostic”. In support of this point I explained to her
and the others present that in EFT, what hurts the most points to what is most
important to the person. In the segment
with my client, the pain (and the tears) came when most strongly they tried to
tell their vulnerable part that it was “worthy”. In EFT terms, this is taken as evidence that
core pain is associated with feeling “unworthy”. Humanistic therapists don’t like to use the
word “diagnosis” in its various forms, but in this instance that seems like an
accurate characterization to me.
After the question and answer period, the
organisers announced that dinner would shortly be served. The tables were quickly re-arranged and
salad, several types of pasta, and bottles of wine were put out, and the
meeting continued as a social event. We
lingered for quite a while, talking to various people, while I marveled at the
development of what is now a rich field of study, which has developed so far
from the beginnings that I witnessed in the mid-1970’s.
References:
Sutherland, O.,
Peräkylä, A., & Elliott, R. (2014). Conversation Analysis of the Two-Chair
Self-Soothing Task in Emotion-Focused Therapy.
Psychotherapy Research, 24, 738-751. doi: 10.1080/10503307.2014.885146
Hepburn, A. (2004). Crying: Notes on
description, transcription, and interaction.
Research
on Language and Social Interaction, 37, 251-290.
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